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Setting the bar quite low
Randy Barnett has an interesting article on libertarian opinion and the Iraq war in the Wall Street Journal. It had this little nugget of pessimism disguised as hope
They hope that the early signs of progress in this offensive will continue, so that American and Iraqi forces can achieve the military victory necessary to allow the Iraqi government to assume responsibility for protecting the Iraqi people from terrorists, as well as from religious sectarian violence. They hope this success will enable American soldiers to leave Iraq even before they leave Europe and Korea, and regain the early momentum that led, for example, to Libya’s abandonment of its nuclear weapons program.
WWII ended in 1945, the Cold War in 1991, and Korea has been at truce, if not at peace since 1953. that means we would be in Iraq until 2040 at the earliest?
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The quotable Dwight Eisenhower
While perusing WikiQuote while waiting for some files to upload I came across these nuggets of wisdom
if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.
An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking… is freedom.
In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, “How stupid can you get?”
The runner up
The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened — by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.
Any my favorite
Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer.
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That crazy Putin
From a slighly hysterical article on MSNBC.com
Equality, to Putin, means no more patronizing lectures from the West on Russia’s history—or its dismal human-rights record. Russia, he believes, has nothing to be ashamed of. As he told a group of visiting teachers last month, foreigners “must not be allowed to impose a feeling of guilt on us—after all, we did not use nuclear weapons against a civilian population [like the United States in Nagasaki].”
The two data points he seems to be using for this comparison are America 1776 to 1945, and Russia from February to late April. Curiously unmentioned is the 50% of Chechens that were killed in the 1990s. Oh well. Russia is always going to be Russia I guess.
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The Jimmy Carter killer rabbit story
Subadei posted about the giant badgers the British have supposedly unleashed on Southern Iraq (and if they haven’t, why are they holding back?) and I did a quick search for “Jimmy Carter Rabbit Attack” on Google and it returned 341,000 results! The more notable ones are
- News of the odd
- The Straight Dope
- and of course, Wikipedia
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Sunday rapid fire
- The wealthiest Americans in history
- Lead exposure and crime – interesting if not convincing
- A preachy CNN.com article on vacations – and why some people don’t like them. Evidently any deviation from the middle class norm is unhealthy
- The Battle of Omdurman by the War Nerd
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A wonderful adage
Via PurpleSlog comes “until robots get better” which is a fine life motto. Much more appropriate these days than Woodie Guthrie’s “Until we outnumber ’em”
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Days of rage
Not only have I worked for free for 30 hours in the past two days on a Classic ASP (obsolete in 2003 if any one is curious) project mind you (a long story I won’t share here) but now I find that my car won’t start.
Predictably, I’ve noticed that I’m fighting the urge to grind my teeth and have a sudden urge to clean the house. It’s odd those are always my responses to anger and stress.
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This is surprisingly cheap
Hang gliding at Lookout Mountain. And tantalizingly close. I think I’ll do that sometime this summer.
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Frustration
Though I’ve said this before, never again will I try to fix someone else’s work, or deal with client’s at the end of a project if I haven’t dealt with them in the beginning.
An enraging day was had by me.
Update at 6:15 – it’s sad when a different server error is the high point of a (so far) 12 hour day.
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The start of the Friday In Appreciation Series
I’ve decided to start a more or less weekly series about the people and forces of that don’t get enough credit in our society. I call it the Friday In Appreciation Series.
We live in age when sanctimonious piety rivals hydrogen as the most common thing in the universe. Be it suburbanites railing against city-dwellers not having children, Ultra-Calvinist urbanites railing against Bushies standing in the way of progress, or Muslims from loser countries blaming Danish cartoons for their crappy lives, it’s hard to walk five feet without getting smacked in the face by righteous outrage, backed up by the usual litany of reasons people have for telling other people to run their lives.
But there’s one group that not only walks the walk and talks the talk; they also handle the snakes. Yep, I’m talking about Snake Handlers. It’s refreshing to see someone use the fine print and not bother other people. They actually follow the fine print just because it’s there. They even keep going when their leaders die of snake-bite. Now that’s faith!
Thus I begin the series.